Google Releases New Image Fomat

Google, in an effort to increase overall speed of the entire Internet, has developed a new image format called WebP.

Based on the VP8 codec, which Google open sourced in May, WebP is a lossy image format that offers an average of 39% reduction in size opposed to JPEG. Google also adapted a lighweight container based on RIFF, which contributes an overhead of 20 bytes per image.

"We expect that developers will achieve in practice even better file size reduction with WebP when starting from an uncompressed image," product manager Richard Rabbat said in a post to The Chromium Blog.

In addition to the codec, Google also released a conversion tool allowing developers to translate existing images into the new format. They are also working on a patch for WebKit that will provide native support for WebP in a future version of Chrome. Transparency support is also planned in a future update to the format.